Friday, 8 May 2015

08/05/15 - Bananas

Bananas. They’re
good, aren’t they? You can slice them lengthways and fill them with ice cream
to create a ’50s-style dessert, drop their skins on the floor to stymie any
passing video game characters in go-karts, or leave a trail of them into a big
cardboard box that you’re propping up with a stick on a string, so that you can
easily trap a monkey and take it home.
They’re interesting things, ’nanas. If you put them in a bowl of unripe fruit,
they emit ethylene gas to ripen everything up. Why do they do this? Because
they’re frickin’ magic, that’s why. And here are some other things you might
not know about your favourite unzippable yellow fruit:

Bananas are berries
True story. The botanical definition of a berry is ‘a fleshy fruit produced
from a single flower and containing one ovary’. Also joining bananas in the ‘Strewth, are they really berries?’ category are grapes,
honeysuckle, pumpkins, tomatoes, watermelons, and avocados. (Incidentally, many
of the things you think of as berries actually aren’t; blackberries and
raspberries are aggregate fruits, mulberries are multiple fruits, strawberries
are accessory fruits – don’t let the names fool you.)

Bananas are radioactive
Don’t get excited, loads of things are radioactive to some degree or another –
it doesn’t mean they’re spurting dangerous levels of plutonium all over your
kitchen. But bananas are noticeably more radioactive than other foods – they
contain a lot of potassium, and potassium decays.
There is actually such a thing as a ‘Banana Equivalent Dose’ (BED), referring
to the level of exposure to radioactive isotopes from eating a single banana.
The average daily exposure to radiation is 100 BED, or the equivalent of eating
a hundred bananas. The maximum permitted leakage at a nuclear power plant is
set at 2500 BED. If you have a CT scan to your chest, you’re exposed to 70,000
BED. And so on.
Fear not, a lethal dose in banana terms is around 80,000,000 BED – to be
honest, you’ll die if you eat eighty million of anything.

Bananas make you happy
…in a roundabout sort of way. These little yellow treasures contain tryptophan,
which is an essential amino acid. Such acids cannot be synthesised, so they
need to be part of our diet. Brilliantly, tryptophan is a biochemical precursor
for serotonin, and serotonin is a thing that sits in your central nervous
system spreading feelings of wellbeing and happiness throughout your brain and
body. It’s possible that eating lots of bananas will make you giddy with glee –
you’ll have to experiment for yourself.

Bananas are all asexual
clones
Supermarket bananas, that is. Every banana that you see on the shelf has been
produced via a process called parthenocarpy, which literally means ‘virgin
fruit’. It’s a form of plant-based artificial insemination, leading to seedless
fruit.
Bananas as we know them, you see, are not naturally occurring fruits, and
wouldn’t survive without human intervention. Wild bananas are pollinated by
bats and produce very small fruits; the plump bananas we know today are the
product of generations of human manipulation, selecting and refining
parthenocarpic fruits and propagating them en masse.

You’re eating a Cavendish
banana
…probably. If you’re eating a banana at the moment.
The asexual ’nana you’re most likely to find in the supermarket is a Cavendish.
Their history dates back to the 1830s, when William Cavendish, 6th Duke of
Devonshire, received a shipment of bananas for his gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton,
to cultivate in the greenhouse of Chatsworth House. Cavendish bananas, proving
successful and delicious under Paxton’s watch, were then shipped all over the
world, including to the Canary Islands, where they thrived, and from whence
they were ultimately imported back into the UK by Thomas Fyffe in the 1880s.
Cavendish bananas entered mass commercial production in 1903, eventually moving
to the no.1 banana spot when the Gros Michel variety was decimated by Panama
disease in the 1950s.

There’s no point smoking
bananas
If we’re to believe the late-1960s Donovan song Mellow Yellow, it’s possible to get high on bananadine. This is, of
course, nonsense.
A hoax recipe for bananadine was published in the Berkeley Barb, an underground counterculture newsletter in
California, in 1967; it detailed how it was possible to extract a psychoactive
substance from banana skins which you could then smoke to achieve LSD-like
effects. This gained some credence when William Powell, who thought it was
true, reproduced it in The Anarchist Cookbook
in 1970. In fact, the original feature in the Barb was a satirical piece questioning the ethics of criminalising
psychoactive drugs; smoking banana skins may create a placebo high at best, but
there’s no scientific reason why you could actually get stoned on bananas. You
can’t.